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The array of software for network backup is mind-boggling, but we settled on Cobian Backup 7 ( www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm ). The current version has some nice features. It's not your typical backup-and-restore software; it makes security copies of the files and folders you select, as often as you schedule them. It doesn't use proprietary file formats and won't compress files unless you tell it to. But it can compress them using standard ZIP algorithms and encrypt backed-up files. You restore files or folders from Cobian Backup simply by copying them back to the original drive. It will do full, incremental, or differential backups. And the price is a DIYer's dream: free.

One of the things you have to decide when designing a network backup strategy is where you want the backup software to runon the individual PCs or on the backup server. We wanted ours to be a true backup server, with all of the centralized file management options that entails, not just a repository drive for data dumped on it by the client machines, so we opted to run Cobian Backup on the server.

You then choose how you want Cobian to access the files on the client machines. The first step, of course, is to turn on file and print-sharing. From there, set the sharing permission for each folder you want to back up or simply drag the folders you want to back up into the Shared Documents folder. Cobian can see that folder on every machine that has file and print-sharing turned on.

This works best in a "friendly" environment, where individual users don't need to keep files secret from one another. If you want to minimize exposure of client PCs to one another, run Cobian on each machine and encrypt the backups to the central drive. In any case, you probably don't want to turn on sharing for the entire drive on the client PCs: You'd be opening the door to inadvertent damage as well as malicious mischief.

Tasks in Cobian Backup are extraordinarily easy to set up. A tabbed menu lets you choose the type of backup; select the files and folders; schedule the backup; choose compression or encryption; include and exclude specific files, file types, or folders; and perform scripted events before and after each backup.

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